Vital Parts

by Thomas Berger

  Time was, the guys who worked at the VA were themselves war mutilates. You were handed a pen by an aluminum arm terminating in a sort of C-clamp. The employees were now mostly dim-witted females of indeterminate age. One such took care of his change of beneficiaries.

  He still had not written the letter to Winona. For all his alteration of personality, now in its second day, he expected to wait until the last evening, as he had with college themes, spend all night on it, and go red-eyed and coffee-bilious into a bed of ice in the morning.

  The fat girl turned in the doctor’s walk and came up it wearily but also inexorably, putting one foot ahead of the other as if plodding through knee-high surf.

  Reinhart was reminded of Winona because it was she, had been she since the descent from the bus. He had recognized her instantly because she had been his daughter for sixteen years, but it had always been his habit when seeing Winona at a distance to assume, until she reached his immediate vicinity, that she was someone else—no, that she would turn into someone else, be transformed by a sudden miracle, pumpkin into golden coach.

  Ah, Winona, why must you choose this doctor for your scratchy throat, sinus congestion, chafing-rash, or gas pains? Old Doc Perse, five blocks from home, can meet the needs of your hypochondria, as he always has before, with the usual dietary recommendations which you never follow, the pills you cannot tolerate, the tinctures you never apply because they burn.

  Why can’t you let me alone? Reinhart was thrust back into his old bitterness at Winona’s lone pursuit while all others retreated. Followed by the old guilt. Perhaps she was truly ill for once, childhood cancer, spinal meningitis, muscular dystrophy, leukemia. Had terrible symptoms with which Doc Perse, senile eccentric, could not cope: lumps that would not go away, strange bleeding, persistent pain.

  But a new jealousy ensued. You will die before me, is that your game? Even that will be taken away from me? And by you, Winona. How could you? You who, uniquely, never caused me trouble. How dare you? A fat little simpleminded girl.

  His daughter. You could still love someone for whom you felt contempt. Else you were stuck with those who were contemptuous of you. The world was accessible to such divisions: young or old, black or white, masochist or sadist, those you wanted or those who wanted you.

  Winona halted halfway up the walk, as if by the force of his silent speech. Go home, dear; go elsewhere; go eat. For the love of God, Winona, I am leaving you ten thousand dollars. What more do you want of me?

  This turned her around. Her dress was one solid bag of flesh. He could see, from the plastering of her skirt to her rear, that she had got a seat on the bus; and from the great circle of damp, that the vehicle had not been air-conditioned.

  You don’t want to see me, Winona. I’ve been rolling with a whore all night. I am not a fit father, never have been, and will be a nullity soon. Quit while you’re ahead.

  This started her walking towards the street, eyes downcast to paddle shoes. Unless she watched where she went, Winona was liable to severe stubs of the toe; in winter, flops on icy patches; in spring-swollen gutters, ankle-deep immersion. Once she had lost a shoe to mud, and left it there.

  I tried to teach you things, Winona. Both you and Blaine, but he was too clever to believe them and you were too stupid. Now look up, Winona, before you step off into the street, make sure no cars are coming, then look down again to see whether the usual public enemy has pitched the usual beer can or throwaway pop bottle below the curb. Step over, not upon, it.

  That warning she heeded, reaching the asphalt roadway without misadventure, but her head was still down.

  Neck straight now, Winona. Chin high, eyes right and left. With a smart, rapid stride you have plenty of time to cross to the opposing bus stop, boarding station for the return home, the means to get well out of my hair, before that oncoming truck gets anywhere near.

  No, you had better run, Winona. Either across or back will do. Plenty of time, no panic. But please look up. And don’t, of all things, stop dead!

  He punched both fists through the window of this controlled-climate room.

  Winona turned at his shout. The truck lifted her as though, despite her bulk, she was weightless.

  20

  Both Reinhart’s hands were cut but not seriously. The emergency reception at St. Bartholomew Hospital made short work of these matters: a student nurse swabbed his hurts and circumnavigated them with a giant roll of gauze.

  Winona’s blanket-covered stretcher claimed the journeyman personnel. They disappeared with it behind a white door. Reinhart’s efforts to follow had been frustrated, and for a number of reasons, most of them arising like noxious vapors from the cesspool of his weakness, he could not persist.

  But he stayed and drank the proffered coffee, declined the bed, later on refused the meal, still later was mostly mute with the kindly priest except to say they were not Catholic, information he had already provided for the nun who filled out the admission card and which indeed was not asked now, but he had no one else to apologize to. Three of the Reinharts had no religion. Blaine of course saw God as the “face of mankind.” Gen used to pretend to be Episcopalian for snob reasons, but wouldn’t have known where to find the church. Reinhart had been raised on Presbyterian sermons on themes taken from the Reader’s Digest by a stout preacher whose sport was bowling. But because her gang of inimical girl friends were Methodist, Winona padded off weekly to that Sunday school and sometimes as well to fun-filled Young People’s Group get-togethers, at which the boys ignored and the girls derided her.

  The priest said it didn’t matter, smiled cryptically, and went away. Reinhart sat on the bench for three hours more, endlessly contemplating his exchange of suicide for murder, commission for omission, father for daughter. He also tried many times to reach Genevieve, but no one answered the phone at the boutique. This must be the one day in summer midweek they were closed. Neither was anyone home, nor at the Raven household. He must take it in the classic condition of the nightmare: alone. And no one was more deserving.

  In the frenzy of his entrance, he had however managed to notice one doctor, a short man in a crew cut. Later on, reliving the whirl of images, he remembered him, remembered his own obscene wig, snatched it off with some difficulty owing to the bandaged hands, and thrust it down the throat of a swing-lid wastecan. The catastrophe had turned him back into the old Reinhart. And in his old style he sat there, a fly of soul imprisoned in the amber of existence.

  It must have been evening when through his stupor he recognized the crew-cut intern leaving by the door to the emergency driveway. All over, then. The man could not face him. Reinhart felt sorry for the doctor: to have worked so long and hard. He pursued the white jacket, caught up with him on the asphalt outside.

  “Doctor,” he said, panting in the torrid evening air, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done. I don’t want you to think I—” He lost his thought in tears.

  “Now, now,” said the intern. He patted towards Reinhart’s arm, missing it. “You go see Father Horgan.”

  Between the sobs Reinhart said: “I’m not Catholic.”

  “Well then, the receptionist will call your clergyman.” He was kind, but seemed anxious to go, probably to supper; they worked long hours for little money and their meals were catch-as-can. Reinhart remembered Dr. Kildare: the original films, to which the TV version could not compare, for the simple reason that Reinhart had been a youth when the former came out.

  “I don’t want to detain you after a backbreaking day,” Reinhart said, trying to get a handkerchief out of the pocket of those indecent, tight pants. “It must be as terrible for you. I don’t know how you—”

  “In fact, it wasn’t one of the worst ones,” the intern confessed. “Not a single cut throat or gunshot wound of the abdomen—some of them can be real dillies. But I’ve got to run to catch the first show.”

  The coldblooded skunk! Let a little girl die, and then, calling it a good day, go to a movie. Reinhart tried to bal
l his bandaged fist. Then it came to him, awfully, that even in death Winona was overlooked in the distractions of spite, as she had always been at home.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, opening the hand and offering it to the doctor. “I know you tried. Did she ever regain consciousness?”

  “Who?”

  “The child, the little girl, who was hit by the truck. My—” Reinhart broke down again.

  “Nobody like that showed up today. Some big fat woman was brought in in late morning. I don’t know what hit her, but whatever it was it probably got the worst of it. Wow, some adipose tissue! She got off with a few fractures and bruises.”

  Winona’s right leg, encased in plaster and attached to a rope-and-pulley arrangement, pointed to the ceiling. Reinhart could see her round face, unmarred and rosy, through these obstructions. He came around from the foot of the bed.

  “Dear …”

  “Hi, Daddy,” she said as of old. “Well, I did it again, I guess! If you told me once, you told me five thousand times not to cross in the middle of the block. So I got what was coming to me.”

  “Ah, Winona.” Reinhart bent to kiss her wide forehead.

  “But I guess it just wasn’t time for my number to come up.” No doubt she was quoting a line from some war movie. Her wry grin dimpled one cheek, over a squared jaw.

  “Darling, what matters is that you’re alive,” Reinhart said. He pulled up a chair. He had done that to someone else’s bed recently—oh yes, Splendor’s. It was difficult in one episode to remember or believe in another.

  “I would have been in really bad shape if I hadn’t heard the sound of smashing glass a split-second earlier, and turned to look, you know: well, because of that, the bumper caught me on the bottom, where, if you have to get hit, it’s the best place, especially on me. I guess I am all green and purple there. You know how I bruise so easy anyway. They got an air cushion underneath, shaped like a doughnut. Which reminds me: Do you think you have to go all evening without anything else to eat after having supper at five thirty?”

  “It was a miracle, Winona.” Reinhart searched for her near hand, which was under the sheet. “What’s this, dear?”

  She pulled out another plastered part. “That’s the funny thing, Daddy. I only broke bones when I landed. My leg got twisted and my wrist and a couple fingers. If there had been a soft place to land, like a pile of tires or a pond full of water—”

  It was hard to show affection to a cast. Reinhart withdrew his hand. Winona saw his own bandages.

  “Oh, you got hurt too! Did you burn yourself?”

  “A minor mishap, dear. Very routine in the kind of life I lead.”

  “I thought about that, Daddy. I thought about how you went through the war, getting shot at and bombed and never got a scratch. And then hanging around with the Mafia, and your other adventures. And here I can’t cross Northdale Avenue.”

  Reinhart realized he had exaggerated somewhat in disclosing his history to Winona. He had been in the rear-echelon Army and he had known Jimmy Marsala, who later on seemed to have become a gangster.

  “Too much can be made of that sort of thing, darling. Comparisons are invidious, as they say. You are a young girl and I am an old man. Naturally we will have different experiences.”

  “Not old, Dad. You’re in the prime of life. That’s where I wish I was, in my forties. So I didn’t have all that stuff to go through yet.”

  “What stuff, dear?” Though he thought he knew what she meant.

  She grimaced. “Maybe I wouldn’t mind being a mother after it was all over and I could change the baby and rock him and so on. But you got to go through a lot of unpleasant things before that.”

  “Not nowadays, Winona. They give you pills and shots and it is relatively painless. You are thinking of the olden times, when a woman had to bite on a bullet. Anyhow, that is still many years in the future. And last time we talked you didn’t think you wanted to get married at all, if you remember.”

  “I sure haven’t changed my mind about that.”

  Reinhart looked around the room. “Not bad here, TV set and all. I would get you some flowers if you weren’t allergic to them.”

  “I told them my father was very well-to-do,” said Winona, showing a new smugness. “I hope that was OK. I didn’t want to go into a ward. Course I would if you said so—”

  “Don’t be foolish, Winona, certainly you shall keep this lovely private room. The best is none too good.”

  “Daddy, I hope you were not called away from one of your important business meetings for this stupid accident of mine. I told them not to bother you, and anyway I didn’t know where you could be gotten ahold of anyway, now you don’t live at home any more. I never expected to see you this soon.”

  “I was here right along, dear, as it happened. I was sitting down there in emergency reception all day and nobody bothered to tell me. I thought you might have died.”

  “Poor Daddy, how rotten for you.” Winona’s eyes watered. “I bet you didn’t get anything to eat, either.”

  “Don’t you worry about that, darling’” Reinhart saw the crucifix above the bed. “I guess these Catholics are treating you pretty well.”

  “Oh this is a neat place,” said Winona with enthusiasm. “You know, they don’t have nurses but nuns. Isn’t that neat?”

  “Yes, it is,” Reinhart said, “and I am happy to see they still wear the good old-fashioned habit and don’t belong to one of those modernized orders who wear civilian-looking outfits. That takes away the whole idea, if you ask me, even though I’m not Catholic.”

  She gave him a searching look. “What about, Daddy, if I became a nurse-nun? Would you just hate me for that?”

  It was the perfect solution, in fact. Reinhart said: “You might think quite seriously about that, dear. I have always thought that when it comes to religion, the only genuine one, all wool and a yard wide, is the Catholic Church. It is a magnificent institution and responsible for most of the culture of Europe. If I had it to do all over again I might very well become a priest or monk, myself.”

  Winona’s face was a sun upon the pillow. “Then that does it!” she cried. “I always wanted to help people, to be as nice as I could, even when it hurts—and it sure does hurt sometimes, and you wonder whether you have done the right thing, but you are repaid by the knowledge that you relieved somebody’s distress.”

  Reinhart felt his eyebrows coming together. “That’s right, that’s right,” he said vaguely, then collected himself. “Of course, you can’t live only for other people, though. If, being human, they deserve help, so, being human yourself, do you. I mean, your own self is sacred too. That’s why, I think, the Church calls suicide as great a sin as murder.”

  Winona also frowned. “But if someone wants you to do something they cannot do for themself, and it has to be done or they will go crazy, well, don’t you have to be pretty nasty not to help them out?”

  A nun entered the room at this point. She was a young woman, healthily colored within the white coif. Reinhart had always found them female yet sexless, and stayed away from those obscene movies in which voluptuous actresses, negligeed or bikinied in their last feature, wore the habit.

  “Hi!” she said, breezing up to the bed. “How’s the girl? This your dads? Groovy gear you’re wearing, man!”

  “This is Sister Mary Margaret, Daddy,” said Winona. “She is my friend.”

  “You know it.” She put her hand at Reinhart. He shook it. “I’m going off now, and came to say good night.” She smiled brazenly into Reinhart’s eyes. “I’m glad I did.”

  He opened his hand but did not succeed in getting rid of hers. He said: “I want to thank you for taking care of my little girl.”

  “Oh, that’s my specialty,” said Sister Mary Margaret, twisting her trunk in such a way that her breasts made themselves known. “I take care of everybody.”

  Reinhart blushed. She still had his hand. He mumbled: “Winona was just telling me she might like to become
a sister.”

  “It can be pretty dreary,” said Mary Margaret, hooking her free hand into her waist rope and arching her hip, “but thank God, not what it used to be. I mean, we have to wear this sheet at work, because it is more practical than even a nurse’s uniform when the blood and pus are flying, but when you’re off you can go back to the barracks and get into something human.” She leered at Reinhart. “You should see the clear plastic miniskirt I got the other day at Switched-On. You really should.”

  Winona said excitedly: “That’s my mother’s shop.”

  The nun ignored her. “But,” she said, “not tonight. I’m spoken for.” She pinched Reinhart’s palm. “Hey, wait a minute. We’re going to the Gastrointestinal System. He’ll probably get stoned after an hour. So if you want to come around later—you know the Funky Broadway? You look like a mean dancer.”

  Reinhart said: “Sorry, I’m all tied up.”

  “That figures.” She ran a hand across his crew cut. “Sexy. I thought they were out.” She turned to Winona: “Keep it cool, baby.” And left, like a sloop in a gale.

  “Isn’t she nice?” asked Winona. “She told me to call her Marge.”

  “Really a terrific person,” Reinhart said, “and full of pep.”

  “So everything’s just fine now, Daddy. I was pretty worried for a while, because though, well, you weren’t around to talk to, and you know how Mother is, working her fingers to the bone, poor thing, and I don’t like to bother her, and Blaine, he would just make fun—”

  Reinhart said, not listening: “It is certainly something to think about, dear, being a nun. But you might check into the various orders. Sister Mary Margaret is an excellent type, no doubt, but not everybody has the same personality, Winona. You might find you prefer the serenity of some secluded convent. You do see a lot of ugly sights around a hospital.”